Let us all take these next few months to nourish ourselves as artists and human beings. Florence Price’s legacy calls us to leverage our artistry to break barriers, and forge new paths for the marginalized. I, for one, plan to stay steadfast in this aim in the face of uncertainty. Will you join me?
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The International Florence Price Festival is partnering with the University of Maryland School of Music to bring together performers, scholars and advocates from around the world to celebrate the life and legacy of the late African American composer Florence Price.
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“…until that point I thought classical music had been written mostly by white men. So many people think that classical music was written more or less exclusively by white men, this is not actually the case, there have been (and are) hundreds of brilliant women who composed truly spectacular music but always struggled to get recognition in a world full of systemic prejudice and deep institutionalised sexism. Florence Price inspired me to start discovering them and championing them.”
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“Florence Price’s daughter, Florence Robinson, expressed similar frustrations after Price died in 1953. Artists were happy to perform Price’s arrangements of Negro spirituals, but she found no advocates for her mother’s symphonic compositions…”
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“After her death in 1953, Price maintained a loyal following among a small but dedicated group of scholars, performers, organizations, and connoisseurs who diligently put forward a range of scholarly editions, papers, recordings, documentaries, and performances carrying the torch forward.“
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“When an important composer's papers, including dozens of her best works, are lost and then later found, an entire cottage industry must necessarily grow up around bringing these works to life.“
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“With hundreds of works, including two violin concertos and four symphonies, there is a wealth of repertoire to explore for practitioners in almost every musical genre.“
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The late Rae Linda Brown puts it succinctly: “Price tackles the issues of gender and race up-front by mentioning, then dismissing them.” In doing so, she encourages Koussevitzky to follow suit.
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Essentially, she struggled with being “caged.” Should she renounce the inclusion of Negro Spirituals in her compositional style to assimilate to a more Eurocentric view of orchestral music? Should she uphold her responsibility to “uplift the race” through the use of direct Negro Spiritual quotations in her music — something that Alain Locke believed was the key to racial uplift?
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